HELLO AND WELCOME! Before you can post your question, you'll have to register -- it's completely free and registered users see less advertising! If you just want to browse through the existing questions, just select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. Otherwise, click here to register!. We highly recommend that you print a copy of our Guide for New Members. Enjoy!

Innovation Loses If Open Source Wins

I Found this to be an extremely interesting article. It really does raise a lot of questions as to what would happen if open source prevails....What do you guys think it would be like if open source wins.

Aragorn

If you give a man a fire he'll be warm, if you light the man on fire he'll be warm for life.

Re:Innovation Loses If Open Source Wins

I think the article had some interesting points, but a lot of them were ignorant. IBM issued the subpeona's in order to investigate whether those companies are funding SCO's suit and claims. I don't think companies would develop any more "closed source" hardware if microsoft went away than they currently do. There is a variety of hardware available and always will be. Certain hardware is designed with certain tasks in mind. Other hardware is designed to be cost effective more than focusing on one thing. And if everyone goes Open Source on the software side, then the companies will be more likely to participate in that. If Open Source won the fight, then they'd have to be more willing to work with Open Source projects in order to survive, because it would be obvious that that's where the market lies. Thus, his theories are fine and dandy, but they don't hold a lot of water in my book.

Re:Innovation Loses If Open Source Wins

I too think that a lot of it is far fetched, but it does raise some good points as well. I can seriously see going abroad especially to India as a development area for developers and companies, they are already doing it. Hardware, no, I think not. It would be useless in a world where open source is king those closed source drivers would be cracked immediately. They won't find it financially productive do closed source. Only thing that I worry about is the profit potential, it will be a world of selling support not products. Which that will be bad. GPL is a great licensing model, but it does have its flaws as well. We still need a model where companies can still sell software products and not always have it to where it can reproduced indefinitely. Don't know I"ll have to think about that....hmmm...

Aragorn

If you give a man a fire he'll be warm, if you light the man on fire he'll be warm for life.

Re:Innovation Loses If Open Source Wins

I think this guy is just blowing smoke in my opinion. I don't see what Open Source software has to do with companies moving to third world countries.

They do that now to avoid the cost of paying Americans minimum wage. I think the reason for this is because our country has become almost nothing, but large companies that deal in large bucks. Mom, and Pop stores that would hire Americans to run their shop are out of buiness because they can't compete with company A down the street.

I mean if you think about it right now, if we lost our big companies, America would be screwed for a while there, because they are what provide everything. Entertainment, Food, Clothes, etc.. etc...

The way I see it, the reason we go over seas is because these large companies have found a way to cheat the money pool by getting cheaper guys. They/We did it to ourselfs. Mom, and Pop wouldn't do that because their store is here in America, and not in China, or India.

This is a little different in Software Engineering though, when all you need is an internet connection to get connected, but that's the price you pay for technology.

What I'm saying is we do it to ourselfs by putting to much money into one thing. *ahem* Sports *ahem* Mircrosoft. I'm through now.